Legal

FBI seize Lennon fingerprints

By | Published on Friday 8 October 2010

The FBI has seized a card carrying John Lennon’s fingerprints which was due to be sold at a New York auction house, claiming the prints belong to the US government.

The prints were seemingly taken at an NYC police station in 1976 when Lennon applied for permanent US residence. They were due to be sold at an auction of 850 pieces of rock n roll memorabilia timed to coincide with what would have been Lennon’s 70th birthday this weekend. The boss of the auction house, Peter Siegel, says the item had a reserve price of $100,000.  

FBI agents approached Siegel when he first made the list of items to be auctioned public. They came to inspect the prints and returned later with a subpoena to seize the item. After consulting the owner and his lawyers, the auction man handed the prints over. He says it’s now for the owner of the card to decide whether he tries to get it back from the authorities. 

It’s not clear how the prints ended up in private hands in the first place, though the current owner of the card says he bought them at a convention twenty years ago. Leon Wildes, who worked as Lennon’s immigration lawyer in the seventies, told the New York Times that some paperwork relating to the singer’s application for residence was stolen in 1976, and that included a fingerprint form, so it’s possible the card for sale came from those papers and is not the prints kept by the police.

Meanwhile, a Lennon fingerprint card was also sold by Sotheby’s auction house in London in 1991, though a Sotheby’s spokesman said that that card was not an official document, but an extra set of prints Lennon had made and signed for a fan at the police station he visited in 1976. It’s not clear whether that card and the one seized this week might be the same item or not.



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